Alan Ratcliffe wrote:
Some great points Chad. As an "older player" myself, I try and keep up with modern players (who introduced you to Bumblefoot and Eklundh?), but it gets real hard to investigate everything new in depth when you're still struggling to catch up on all the interesting stuff created on the periphery of your own decade. So give us old folk a little leeway... ? But yeah, we allend up a little set in our ways.
This is the thing. Take Hendrix in isolation now and it can be hard to see what the fuss was about. It was hard to see what the fuss was about if you "discovered" him in 1979. Now....
The fact is that Hendrix fundamentally changed the landscape of rock guitar playing. He rewrote the book. If you had the time and a sufficient collection and could start listening to a sizable selection of 60s rock records, in the order in which they were released, you'd be surprised by some of the big steps forward. Hendrix was certainly one of those.
Sir Isaac Newton once said that he could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before him. Newton, in turn, was the giant on whose shoulders Einstein stood.
So it is with guitaring as well.
Hence my comments about Davy Graham. He may well have been surpassed as a technician, but, like Hendrix on electric, he represented such a raising of the bar. And, again like Hendrix, echoes of what he did rang for a long time and wider than may seem obvious at first glance. Not only would we not have a Bert Jansch as we know him without Graham coming first, we probably wouldn't have had a Jimmy Page either. Or a John Martyn. There are those who argue that without Martyn the whole trip-hop scene wouldn have been very different. I sometimes wonder how U2 would have turned out if it weren't for Martyn. Etc etc....
This also puts the newer players in a different context for us - I see players like Andy McKee or Kaki King (we are talking acoustic players here) and while they have impressive skills, they do not have much originality when compared to Michael Hedges who came out of leftfield and screwed all our heads on backwards during the '80s.
Agreed. But I think it's getting harder and harder to be original. There's very few unploughed green fields left to exploit now.
Greatness should be about more than chops. It should also be about impact, about providing new platforms for others to build on.
